A Critical Moment in The Teaching Profession: A Discourse of Tensions

Abstract

This article presents some interpretive understanding of a critical moment in my teaching profession. Different from the widely conducted Classroom Action Research (CAR) which tends to be focused on the very practice of teaching-learning activities in the classroom, the article refers to post-activity evaluative comments from students as data to start the discussion. The students giving the evaluative comments were participants of my course units of Speaking I and Discourse Analysis, Undergraduate Program, English Department, Faculty of Letters, State University of Malang, Indonesia. In the light of Ortega's concept about the "exuberances and deficiencies" of utterances and the notion of "the said and the unsaid" of discourse, the article interpretively assesses the tensions instead of unidirectional-deterministic understanding of the seemingly-simple-yet-complex teaching-learning activities. The article also argues that students' evaluative feedback as discourse bears paradoxes, indeterminacy, and tentativeness. The corollary is that teachers need not be impulsive and, instead, need to be open to students' evaluative feedback, be it positive or negative.